Quick warning before you read: this isn't a launch announcement. It's a story about getting something wrong in public, and changing how I work because of it. If that's not your thing, no hard feelings.
The confession
A little over a month ago I published a Ruby gem called llm_cost_tracker. Here's the honest part: almost all of it was written by an LLM. I prompted, it produced, I shipped. I felt pretty good about myself for about a week. Then I posted it to r/ruby asking for feedback, and people gave me exactly that.
They were right, too. A chunk of the code was just hallucinated. The example I keep coming back to, because it's so on the nose: my gemspec listed activesupport and activerecord as hard dependencies through add_dependency. The gem can't even load without them. And yet, inside the gem, there was code carefully checking at runtime whether ActiveSupport and ActiveRecord were present. It was defending against the absence of the two things it literally cannot run without.
Nobody writes that on purpose. The model produced something that looked careful, and I shipped it without noticing, because I hadn't really read it. Once you spot one of those, you start seeing them everywhere: guard clauses for impossible states, checks that check the checks, abstractions wrapped around abstractions. Paranoia mode. Over-engineering for situations that can't happen.
